Armand Assante Quick Links

Here's yet another preposterous action movie that's made watchable by a skilful director and an engaging cast. While there are some intriguing themes in this spiralling odyssey of revenge, the script never really makes any sense out of the plot, merrily twisting and turning as it whizzes past a series of glaring improbabilities. But Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace put their huge brown eyes to work, holding our sympathies as things get messier by the moment.

Farrell plays Victor, a gun-toting goon working for the slick mobster Alphonse (Howard), who is being taunted by a complex, unnerving plot to bring him down. But Victor is sidetracked by his neighbour Beatrice (Rapace), who comes on strong before revealing that she has seen his handiwork and will report him to the cops if he doesn't help her get revenge against the guy who scarred her face in a drunk-driving accident. This puts Victor in a difficult position since he's already engaged in his own plan to avenge the brutal deaths of his wife and daughter, assisted by a family friend (Abraham) from the old country.

And the plot gets increasingly knotty, as both Victor and Beatrice start to wonder if perhaps falling in love with each other might be a more pleasant way to get over their anger issues. Yes, the film is essentially preaching love and redemption even as the body count nears triple digits. Fortunately, director Oplev brings the same slick-steely style to the film as his original The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. And the always watchable Farrell and Rapace get solid support from Howard and Abraham, as well as Cooper (as Victor's brother in arms), Huppert (as Beatrice's busy-body mum) and the underused Assante (as the big boss).

There's something dead in Denzel Washington's eyes nearly all of the way through Ridley Scott's American Gangster, which takes what should have been a mesmerizing slice of urban historical grit and grinds it into roughly two hours of standard issue cinema. Washington is playing Frank Lucas, a real-life crime boss who for a period lasting from the late 1960s into the following decade, ran Manhattan "from 110th to 155th, river to river." A real slick character who doesn't need to strut his worth on the street, Lucas hates flash like a junkie hates rehab: It reminds him of all he truly is but doesn't want to be. Facing off against him is New Jersey narc Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a womanizing tough guy with a short fuse but a heart of gold (aren't they all), who's so clean that when he and his partner come across $1 million in untraceable cash he had the bad manners to turn it all in without taking a single bill for himself. In a big-city police department in the 1970s, boy scout behavior like that will just plain get you killed -- the guy who's not on the take is the guy who could very well sell you down the river when the grand jury comes sniffing around for who is on the take.

Ridley Scott has a good thing going here, tossing these two Hollywood bigshots into the ring and letting them play cops and robbers while he slathers on the period detail with a trowel. There's some serious Superfly outfits (including a godawful $50,000 chinchilla coat that plays a surprisingly key part in a plot twist), a generous helping of soul music, enough fantastic character actors to choke a horse (Idris Elba, Jon Polito, Kevin Corrigan, an incredibly sleazy Josh Brolin, and so on), the specter of Vietnam playing on every television in sight, and the odd enjoyment one gets from watching cops in the pre-militarized, pre-SWAT days take down an apartment with just revolvers, the occasional shotgun, and a sledgehammer to whack down the door. Scott's smart enough to let the story cohere organically and without rush, keeping his main contenders apart for as long as could possibly be borne, making them fully developed characters in their own right and not just developed in opposition to the other. But there's something in this broad and expansive tale that can't quite come together, and it seems to start in Denzel's eyes.

Maggie Malone (Jenna Mattison) is the type of girl that exists only in the movies: She lives in San Francisco, works in a bookstore (where virtually no one ever shops), rides her bike everywhere (invariably downhill), has a cat and lots of candles, and is friends with the homeless guy who lives in the alley downstairs (he even watches her bike for free!). She's so quirky she shakes hands with a waiter at a fancy restaurant! That's darn quirky!

Maggie Malone's story, alas, is almost too cliched even to exist in the movies. One boring day at the shop (run by Betty White, pretty much the only remotely interesting part of the film), Maggie discovers an old copy of Great Expectations, and suddenly she finds herself being granted a series of wishes, courtesy of a young British guy (Sean Maguire) who says she has a secret benefactor, who apparently is loaded with cash. (Sound familiar?)

Sidney Lumet's sprawling cop/DA drama shows promise but ends up muddled and confused, the victim of a few too many subplots and side characters -- all of whom get killed. Nolte is hilariously bad and good at the same time as a corrupt cop, while Hutton is the earnest DA trying to bust him. Remarkably mediocre.

The Road to El Dorado is DreamWorks' second big attempt, after 1998's The Prince of Egypt, to break into Disney's monopoly on the animated film business. It is an effort as disappointing as the first.

The one aspect of this film that fits squarely within genre conventions is the subject matter. Like such classics as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, El Dorado finds a classical fantasy in the lost city of gold, couching it in a historical context: In this case is the Spanish explorer Cortez's very real search for that mythical city. Unfortunately though, Cortez is lost for the bulk of the film while we are left to follow two roguish Spaniards (voiced by Kline and Branagh) who stumble upon, in sequence, a map to El Dorado, Cortez's ship to the New World, and El Dorado itself. Once the two con artists find El Dorado, they are of course hailed as Gods, and the bulk of the story concerns just how they are going to carry out this charade and make off with the gold back to Spain. In the process, we are left with a half-hearted conniving native medicine man voiced by Armand Assante as our only hope for a true villain. Once they find the lost city, the plot follows turn for turn that of the 1975 Sean Connery vehicle, The Man Who Would Be King. One could argue that plagiarizing a great film is not such a bad idea, considering a great bulk of the audience has never seen said film or read the book it is based on. Nonetheless, it tends to irk any true movie fan to see great movies remade badly.

You know from the first second what you're getting into with this movie. The opening to Judge Dredd, Sylvester Stallone's new sci-fi action vehicle, is not a smash-bang action sequence, but rather a montage of comic book covers from old the Judge Dredd series. This comic book movie intro is getting popular (the third time I've seen something like it this year), and it's getting really, really old.

After the comics are laid out, we have a screenfull of text, explaining the mind-numbingly unoriginal premise of Judge Dredd, which is this: in the future, the world sucks. At first I didn't know why there was a voice-over attached to this text, but then I realized that most of the audience of the film probably couldn't read.

Two for the Money is so frustrating to watch because you can see it falling apart with every additional subplot, every misused actor, and every tectonic shift in the story. The script covers so much ground that by the halfway point you feel none of the loose ends will ever be satisfactorily completed. And sure enough, that's what happens.

Matthew McConaughey plays Brandon Lang, an ex-college quarterback whose ability to pick winning football teams grabs the attention of Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), a big-time New York City gambling advisor, whose apparent wealth and power is enough to convince Lang to skip Las Vegas for the Big Apple.

Making your first feature film ain't easy. Assemble a decent, if not strong, cast, as writer/director Robert Moresco has done with One Eyed King, and you're already ahead of the game. But rehash old plot lines, tired dialogue, and standard clichés, and a well-intentioned effort such as this one could jeopardize your chance at a second feature film.

How many more movies do we need about a rough neighborhood full of lifelong friends hopelessly turned to crime or worse? The enormous catalog of such movies might dissuade a filmmaker from making yet another, but here we have it. Again. Five Irish kids in NYC's Hell's Kitchen make an overemotional pact over some stolen rings on an anonymous rooftop. With teary music. And slow motion. In the film's first scene.